The high cost of data consolidation is the key market inhibitor to the adoption of traditional information integration and data warehousing solutions. In this paper, we outline a next-generation integrated database management system that takes traditional information integration, content management, and data warehouse techniques to the next level: the system will be able to integrate a very large number of information sources and automatically construct a global business view in terms of “Universal Business Objects”. We describe techniques for discovering, unifying, and aggregating data from a large number of disparate data sources. Enabling technologies for our solution are XML, web services, caching, messaging, and portals for real-time dashboarding and reporting.
Paul Brown, Peter J. Haas, Jussi Myllymaki, Hamid